Lifeline
by Mystic25
Summary: Tag to: "The Man Who Knew Too Much." As Dean was about to leave Sam in the Panic Room to find Cas, there was a moment when something should have happened between him and his brother. This is that moment. GEN NO SLASH. SPOILERS,Obviously.


"Lifeline."

Mystic25

Rating: T for Language.

Summary: Tag to: "The Man Who Knew Too Much." As Dean was about to leave Sam in the Panic Room to find Cas, there was a moment when something should have happened between him and his brother. This is that moment. GEN NO SLASH. SPOILERS,Obviously.

A/N: Okay, it's literally thirty-seven minutes since the season finale of "Supernatural." And, my thought processes are all like this:

Sam kicked the _shit_ out of the Wall! That's my boy, and the whole thing about him running through the "forest of his mind" to do it, so awesome can't even put it into more substantial words…

Sam saying that he wasn't going to leave Dean alone out there, made my heart give the biggest constriction ever, I love how those two love each other.

_What? _What the _hell? _Cas became _GOD?_ Again _WHAT? _Somebody got an over inflated sense of his own importance after hitting the Angel Wheeties…

There was just so many things to play with, but I decided to go with the one that stuck out with me the most….the one when it was just Sam and Dean, because that's where the feeling is…

I apologize if the words aren't exact, I'm going off of memory for this scene.

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"_Try to leave a light on when I'm gone  
>Something I rely on to get home<br>One I can feel at night  
>A naked light, a fire to keep me warm."<em>

-David Cook "Light On"

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_Panic Room._

Never has a location been so aptly named to Dean Winchester. A bar wasn't called a "Drunken Man's Dark Hole" nor was a strip joint called a: "House of Masturbation." Instead they were given names to cover up what they really were. Fancy, lewd or just plain erotic names to hide their true identities, like Clark Kent to Superman.

But, not this room, it _was _its name. Since its inception, it had yet to see nuclear fallout, or even the Apocalypse it had heard first spoken of behind its reinforced iron walls. But it _had _seen panic- seen fear, seen desperation, seen everything that broke a man down into pieces. Pieces that then tried to scraped across its floor to try and pull itself back together just so that man could stand upright again.

This was one of those times.

Dean hated that chair at the foot of the cot. If he had matches, or a lighter, hell if he had two sticks to rub together, he would burn the damn thing to ashes. It had been nothing but a thing built to be completely useless, forcing him to sit when he wanted to stand, to watch when he wanted to do anything else but that kind of useless nothing.

He kicked the chair as he moved by it, hearing its leg's scrape across the concrete floor like a whine of protest, he told it to go to hell. He knew it was insane to curse out a piece of furniture, but he was in a room where sanity didn't allow itself in. He wasn't insane. Sanity was _outside _this place, rather he was _out_ of sane.

He was out of sane, circling a metal cot where Sam was lying unconscious. His brother, his – whatever you called it when you could feel each heartbeat of someone because it beat at the same rhythm as yours. He was going to call it as the truth –_his soul._ Because there was no other way to describe the gut wrenching pain he felt choking him at seeing Sam lying there not dead, but not awake, taking the pain Sam felt as his own.

Sam hadn't moved unless it was to have a seizure, or to cry out in some agony that Dean couldn't see. And Dean could do nothing but hold Sam's flailing limbs down to keep him from falling off the cot and hurting himself, calling out: "_Sam- Sammy!, it's okay man, it's okay, I got you!"_

But what Dean did never lasted, it never kept away Sam's pain, it was never enough.

And. It. Was. _Killing._ Dean.

Dean had held him down from seizures before, when he was detoxing from demon blood, but this was different, this was _very_ different. This wasn't something Sam did to himself, this was something done _to_ him, done to him by who Dean had valued as a friend- a brother.

Seeing Sam fall into a boneless heap in the alleyway under Cas's hand, it was like a bullet, ripping through both him, and his brother. Because, when Sam fell, Dean fell with him, screaming, one word, Sam's name, over and over again. Cas had vanished as soon as Sam's Wall had dissolved. When Dean wanted him there, to scream at _him_: "_What the hell did you do?" _When he wanted to know _WHY? _Because he didn't understand.

But who ever gave a fuck about what he wanted?

What Sam wanted?

Losing Lisa and Ben, it tore a hole inside of him, it made him bleed.

But, this, losing Sam, his _soul, _by the hands of a _friend. _It ripped through him, betrayal, and pain, so much pain that it made him unable to stand, to think, to _breathe._

Half of what he was wasn't moving, wasn't there, how _could_ he breathe?

How could he do _anything?_

And he wanted to do things.

He wanted to so bad.

He wanted to reach into Sam's mind and tell him to come out, like they were just playing hide-and-seek like they used to do when they were kids. He wanted to yell at him to stop dicking around and come back to the damn world.

But, when he let go of all that sarcasm and anger, what he really wanted – was Sam.

His snot nosed, scraggly, responsibility of a kid brother was no longer that. He was the other half of himself, the one who supplied breath to his lungs, and a soul to his body.

And watching him be so still, so far away from him, made Dean feel no other way but broken.

Bobby was beside the cot on the other side, cleaning the barrel of his sawed-off, watching Dean. Since he had come in the room to check on Sam twenty minutes ago Dean's eyes hadn't lifted from his brother. Nor had they lifted since he and Dean had laid Sam down on the cot when they first brought him into the Panic Room.

"Times up," Bobby's own words stung him. It was like he was a prison warden telling Dean that visiting hours were over. It was painful to say, even more painful to watch because Dean wasn't listening to him. He continued to walk around Sam's bed, watching his brother, like he was trying to memorize everything about him, everything he _loved_, to give him even an ounce of strength to walk away from Sam.

"Yeah, just give me a minute," Dean said this with a rough voice, one that didn't want to say these words at all.

Bobby eyed the younger man, a conversation of words wanting to come out of his mouth. But in the end, he swallowed them, and left, because, even as the surrogate father to these boys, this was something private. Something he wasn't meant to see.

Dean reached inside the pocket of his jacket for the scrap of paper, pulling it out, and holding it up, to where Sam could see it. Even though his eyes were closed, Dean did it anyway, because the part of Sam that Dean wanted to look didn't need eyes to see.

"This is where we'll be Sam," He waved the paper for emphases, a white flag, not a surrender, a signal, a way for Sam to come back to world.

He stepped closer to the cot, avoiding the evil demon chair, vowing to reduce it to kindling when he returned. He knelt down next to the cot. "How about you get your Sasquatch ass up and join us?"

Sam didn't move. It made Dean not want to either, it made him want to scream, to cry. But he couldn't cry. There was only a handful of minutes left before Bobby would come and drag his ass out of the Panic Room. And he didn't want to spend them in tears. He wanted to spend them with Sam.

"Sammy?"

He had given his brother that nickname so long ago that even _he_ couldn't remember when he had first uttered it. It had started off as kid's moniker; something he would call out when he was _really_ trying to get Sam's attention, and be all 'Older Brother'. Later it became a brotherly tease, a start to a joke. But the name spoken now, wasn't 'older brother.', it wasn't teasing It was trembling, it was a question, a plea, and a want all in one name.

Dean stood up, looking down at his brother, watching him breathe, willing him to open his eyes, promising him damn, fucking everything he could think off if he would just look at him again.

Sam breathed, still unconscious, still locked inside his head, having god knows what done to him. Dean fought a sob and a scream from tearing out of his throat at the same time, ending them both in a swallowed silence that left him breathing heavily.

He set the paper with the address that Balthazar had written beside Sam's head. He walked around to the front of the cot, his pearl handled Colt .45 held in his hand.

"Please-" Dean wasn't begging, he was praying, praying to the only thing he cared about, the one thing that had always been the most important.

He set the gun down on top of the note, the paper rustled under the weight of the gun's body. Where Sam would find them if he opened his eyes-

Something was hurting him, it took him a moment to realize that it was another sob trying to cut off his air. But, he stopped it from being born with such a heavy, choking swallow that his throat burned like fire afterwards.

He palmed the crown of Sam's head, sweeping the hand back to push the hair away from his face, and then kissed him on the forehead. "I love you Sammy." He kept his hand there, his palm warm against his brother.

_The night was like a creature, dark and unyielding. The house in front of Sam was familiar, one that he had walked up since he had been able to walk at all. The only house that he could ever call HOME. But it was so different now, eerie. The cars in the yard like bones in a cemetery, dead dormant things, the house itself something unnatural, a ghost of the warm, solid, real thing. What Sam wanted to see in place of this – joke – of Bobby Singer's house._

_His gun was drawn, straight out, locked, he crept on, through the blackness with no stars. Despite the solidness of the weapon that he could feel, even a subconscious one, it was still unnerving, to walk up in this world so exposed._

_The only way out was up those stairs, and after what his Soulless self had said, Sam wanted to do ANYTHING but walk up them. What was waiting for him in there – he didn't want to face it, because he was alone. And he felt every minute of it._

_But, he didn't want to be alone in here forever, let the world go on without him, because he belonged THERE, not here. _

_So, he tried to steel himself, quell his shaking hands on the gun, focus on the goal of getting out._

_A beeping inside his pocket almost made him drop his weapon. He swept the gun around in a wild aim to make sure no one else had heard such a loud noise. The woods in the Subconscious Bobby Singer's Salvage yard were quiet except for the rustling of wind through the branches of the trees._

_His hand felt inside the pocket of his jacket, pulling out his Blackberry. An object that hadn't been there before. He stared at the display in bafflement, at the words on the screen proclaiming: 'One New Voicemail.'_

_Sam pressed the '1' on the keypad, gun and eyes still trained on the night, and listened to the message._

_The line rang once, then connected, first to a pause, then:_

"_I love you Sammy."_

"_Dean?-" Dean's voice, Dean's REAL voice, deep and there, was on that line. The wind picked up speed, blowing through the leaves, and his hair in turn. But the feeling when the wind blew through his hair; it felt like a touch._

_It was a touch so familiar to Sam, a sweeping, a warmth, to let him know that he wasn't alone. It traveled up him like a shock, making the gun in his hand drop to the dirt, making his eyes burn, and his throat constrict, dropping him to his knees._

"_Dean-" Something was aching inside him. Something that wasn't in here, but rather was out THERE, waiting for him to come back out, to come home. He clawed at the dirt, and picked up the fallen gun, trying to see it through the tears that marred his vision. "__I love you too." _

_Gun in hand, Sam climbed to his feet, wiping at the wet tracks on his face with the heel of his hand. He didn't want to ache forever. He couldn't leave Dean out there alone, he was fucking going HOME!_

_He raised the gun again, a point blank shot at the door, to kill anything that came out, and he started walking again._

A thumping noise made Dean turn around to see Bobby standing in the doorway, his sawed off still in his hand. From the look on his face, Dean could tell that Bobby had overheard him. The small amount of light from the suspended fixtures on the ceiling were shining off a sheen that was in Bobby's eyes. Nothing fell except the emotions that had brought the sheen out in the first place.

These boys were never meant to be each other's entire worlds. But, what wasn't _meant_ to be, held little merit compared to what _was. _

Dean released Sam's head, standing up to his full height, clearing away the thing that was constricting his breathing. Being strong, attempting it, because of what Bobby had said earlier, _"Think about what Sam would want." _

"Let's get this done Bobby," he buried all his tears, all his pain. But his strength, he left beside the gun and the note, for Sam to find. He checked to make sure that the Angel sword was sheathed at his side.

"If I have to leave Sam here, fighting a goddamn war inside his head that I can't get to, I'm taking no prisoners." The gaze Dean set on Bobby was piercing, absolute.

And the only thing Bobby did in return was give a nod of understanding. Dean walked over to him, stepping out the door, with one last glance back at Sam, before Bobby shut it. Shut it, but left it unlocked, so Sam could come back out.

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End.

When I saw that scene with Dean giving Sam the note; it was such a sad, haunting moment, that I literally, _waited _for this scene. For Dean kiss his brother. This had a different ending, but after waking up this morning, and finding the lyrics to "Light On" I got the biggest chill ever, and saw it playing out _this_ way. For Dean to kiss his brother, touch him, and for Sam to feel it, like how he heard Dean calling his name, saw the light in his eyes.

R/R please.

Peace

Mystic


End file.
